A Gallup study tracking nearly 30,000 U.S. workers across four survey waves between 2023 and early 2026 has found that the employees most exposed to AI at work are also the most anxious about losing their jobs and that the quality of their relationship with their manager is one of the strongest buffers against that fear.
Workers who use AI daily or multiple times a week are more than twice as likely to believe their jobs could disappear within five years than those who use it only a few times a month or year. The study also finds that greater AI-induced job anxiety is linked to declines in job satisfaction and employee engagement and to higher burnout and intent to look for another job.
The original Gallup research was authored by Christos Makridis, a content senior researcher at Gallup in Washington. Gallup followed the same workers across multiple survey waves, rather than comparing different groups of people at a single point in time, allowing researchers to examine how changes in an individual's AI use and workplace experiences tracked with changes in their concerns about job displacement.
The data points to a clear managerial effect. Among frequent AI users, the relationship between AI use and job-loss fears was 6.8 percentage points lower among workers who strongly agreed they were respected at work, and 11.1 points lower among those who strongly agreed their organisation cared about their wellbeing.
"The positive effects are really concentrated among the workplaces where workers feel like there's some trust with their managers," Makridis said.
The findings land at a moment when managers themselves are under pressure. Fifty percent of chief human resources officers surveyed by Gallup say they are not very confident or not at all confident in their managers' ability to guide employees on using AI at work. Gallup's research consistently shows today's managers are already carrying expanding responsibilities and broader spans of control, and asking them to lead AI transformation without considering their capacity risks turning a priority into another competing demand.
However clear the corporate strategy coming from the top, it is managers who interpret it for the people actually doing the work , a gap that the Gallup data suggests organisations can no longer afford to overlook.
Source: Christos Makridis, Gallup
